"Shit!"
It's Carrolla. I hear his shout tinnily through the waves, followed by a red flash splashing across my field of view, like blood in the water. Fuck. Her mental immunity is kicking in already, the Lag, reaching out to take a bite. If I don't do something fast it'll bite half her mind away just to get me and the inject out.
"Her neurons and starting to crisp!" Carrolla calls faintly. "Get out of there Rit."
I'm aleady too deep to pull out though, not with the inject still lying there like bloody chum to the Lag. I have to go deeper.
"All levels are up," Carrolla calls, barely audible over the thump of the EMR. "If you're not coming out then get it calmed!"
I gaze through the layers of thought into Mei-An's eyes, big dark staring spheres, and will her to calm down. I've dived deeper than this a hundred times before, and it never gets any easier, or safer, but I've always survived.
The Lag snaps up at me from within her head.
"Look at me Mei-An," I say as I tune my core transponders tighter, driving for stronger resonance. "Look at my eyes, Mei-An, that's it."
She tries to nod but now she's glitching on motor control, making the movement uneven and jerky. She's terrified. I kick a leg at Carrolla to increase the cooling Cerebro-Spinal Fluid flow bathing her brain, because if it gets any hotter inside her skull those neurons really will begin to cook.
"It's OK," I tell her softly. "Mei-An, I need you to relax, can you do that?"
She attempts another nod, and for an instant I see my face reflected in the liquid sheen of her eyes. This is Ritry Goligh, only thirty seven and already my face is forming up in lines like calving Arctic ice. Fuck.
"It's going to be OK," I say, then slide my transponders' wavelength all the way down to fully match with hers.
A rush of thought-data pummels me, hard bubbles rising through the water. These are the inputs and outputs of billions of her individual brain-cells and their action potential states. I swim through them, able only to see the pattern of her mounting panic. Her whole system is in emergency mode. If I had a better EMR I could fix her through that, but this is proto-Calico, a floating slum built of old wreckage and flotation barrels, and I don't.
So I dive.
A second flood of thoughts buffet me like the Allatanc ocean in tsunami: chemical stress levels spiking, the neuron firing rate shooting up, even the inject area for speech flipping belly up as unconsciousness dawns.
"Damn it Rit she's slipping," I hear Carrolla faintly from above, the voice of a ghost.
I dive through the flood and deeper still, down into the root and branch systems of her brain's architecture, blasting by neurons like thick tufts of kelp, so deep I lose my grip on the world above and the sense of my own body flits away, beyond the confines of the machine and through the ocean's crust and into the realm where my mind truly meets hers.
The Molten Core.
Lava blooms around me, the burning red and orange fire of the living mind. This is her consciousness, where she thinks, and here I am an invader. It is bright and chaotic with the violent churning of her thoughts.
Nearby I can see the silvery inject being attacked by the Lag, in a powerful engrammic immune reaction. The Lag here is a kind of worm, massive and fleshy, able to burrow through the blazing lava with ease. I am powerless before it, battered and buffeted by fiery tidal flows. I am the only thing that can save a good chunk of sweet Mei-An's mind.
Everything is to play for now.
My sublavic ship coalesces around me, a submarine built for diving magma in the Molten Core, as it has a thousand times before, hulled with six layers of heat-proof, ablative brick cladding. Within its belly the crew members fire into existence like clay pots forged in a kiln. I send them to their posts throughout the ship, manning the periscope at the conning tower, setting a course for the womb-like frequencies sounding out from Mei-An's Solid Core.
The Solid Core is the utmost center of the mind. I've never entered the Solid Core of another living soul; it would be madness. I've only ever dabbled around the edges. The risks inside are far too massive, where the Lag is infinitely stronger, and the pathways are an unquantifiably complex maze. I'm not even sure I could get in if I tried.
But I don't need to. I only need to get close.
The engine-screw churns the ship inward, and bubbles of memory burst out of the lava ahead, popping over the sublavic ship's prow, leaving behind frazzled hints of who this girl is and was. In one I glimpse her slinging back Arctic gin in an off-wall dive with a guy with a sternum-piercing. In others she makes her first tentative forays across the tsunami wall and into the neon skulks of proto-Calico, falling into company with smugglers, shits, and the children of the Don.
The Lag snaps up at me with ravenous meat-jaws from the magma, and I launch a few sacrificial memories as torpedoes to slake its hunger: my walk through the blue-tarp park that morning, the taste of the juice-box Carrolla brought in for me- Arclo-berry, one of the newest strains out of the pack-ice. I won't miss them too much, and for the moment the Lag is distracted. It's just a worm, ever hungry.
My sublavic ship powers on through molten rock, and in moments I sight the radiant outer edge of what I'm looking for through the sonar, embodied as liquid sound. It is waves pulsing through the magma with a steady
thump thump, thump thump
that is utterly unique, and key to deciphering this girl's burning architecture: her mother's pulse.
The mother's pulse is the first memory formed in a baby's brain. Though all other sound is also heard dimly across the mother's belly wall, muted and simplified, it's the pulse that sounds the loudest for that forming seed in its budding sac.
thump thump
The pulse is goddess, a fingerprint of the mother's heart that molds the baby brain like it was soft clay, shaping it in its own image and instilling it with a unique engrammic immunity. It is the foundation all minds are built upon, locked away in the Solid Core at the heart of the mind, and I can use it, but I don't need to break into Mei-An's Solid Core to get it. I'm close enough to tap the sound like a keg.
Tuning forks winch out of the sublavic ship's sides, punching through the brick cladding, to store this invaluable pattern. The forks melt in moments, but the pattern is captured. I turn the ship around and unleash the sound outward through the ocean of lava-thought, amplifying it massively. The Lag is soothed at once by this gentle lullaby memory of the womb. I drag the sound away from the Solid Core with me, causing Mei-An's mind to bathe itself with the right kind of Cerebro-Spinal Fluid, tinged with harmonics too complex to fake.
It works. I feel her chemical stress levels calming through the flow of lava. Her brain-rate is settling down, so I pull my consciousness out a few layers, back into the realm of my sublavic's bridge. More thoughts bubble up across the periscope; glimpses of her latter days in the company of the Don's son, an abusive shit who beats the will out of her, but calmer now, as the panic spike of her immune rejection stills beneath the smoothing pulse.
thump thump, thump thump
The Lag has been quieted, but it's still out there tracking me sleepily through the lava. The job is not over. If I don't do something, it will still eventually scrub the language engram-inject completely, so I head to zone where Carrolla first injected the Afri-Jarvanese engram, in the crevice between the tail end of the optic nerve and the auditory zone. There I massage the pulse around the engram's edges, guiding it by the nose like I would a kelp-tilling shark. It cools the enflamed cells lining the language dump and pets the Lag on its head like a trusty old dog.
I metaphorically sigh with relief.
"Can I have my Arcloberry back?" I ask the Lag, a wordless information request through the Cerebro-Spinal Fluid. I remember the memory because I only gave the content not the frame, so I remember that it happened and that it's now missing, but not any detail or emotional connection. The Lag is mute on its refund policy.
"My walk through the park then?" I press. "Come on, don't sho
rt me."
It bares its lipless, fleshy teeth. Fair enough, I've lost far more in the past, and at least I still have the frame. Nothing earth-shattering happened on my way through the park anyway. Did it?
Dammit. I pull outward, and my body and the sublavic ship merge back into one as my thoughts suck free of Mei-An's mind. I rush up the tunnel of data and figures as my consciousness disengages, then I'm out again and panting hard in the decelerating thump thump of the EMR machine, back in the graysmithy room.
I'm leaning over her now, looking down on her dark eyes staring back at me. I notice I've drooled on her face. Oh man, that looks bad. I hastily rub it off, my arm a bit jerky as the gears of my brain slot back into sync. She doesn't notice, she's totally out. Then the tray engages, and we're sliding out of the quieting machine together, into the filtered gray light of the dive-room. It's gray for just this moment, to not provide any disconcerting stimulus to a disoriented brain.
"Strong work Ritry," Carrolla says, slapping me on the back.
It takes a moment to associate his words and his movement with the impact on my back. He knows this, and keeps patting until some rudimentary synchronization takes places.
I roll away from Mei-An and look up at Carrolla. He reminds me so much of someone I used to know.
"Fine work, really excellent," he's still saying, words more to key me back to my body and sense than for anything else, "and you bedded it in too. How was the Lag?"
I slide my legs woozily off the EMR-tray, to sit up with my back away from the girl. She'll need a few hours of medicated sleep for her mind to fully settle.
"Not bad," I say. My tongue feels thick as a wodge of dry seaweed in my mouth. Carrolla hands me a glass of water and helps me hold it up while I take a sip. Better. "Have you got any more of those Arcloberry juice boxes though?"
He frowns. "What, you gave up the juice? Hell no, Rit, that didn't come cheap. What's wrong with water, do you not have enough memories of drinking that?"
I shrug. "It came to mind."
He laughs. "Well shit. Still, I heard they've got vodka mixes out at the skulk-end, some new seed-blend. Sound good? Yes sir. Let's get you to recovery."
"I'm fine."
"Of course, I'm fine also, now move it."
Carrolla is always effervescent, even when he's blackout drunk. Perhaps this is part of why I find him cheering, though most people want to punch him after a few minutes. He can get very loud. Either punch him or sleep with him, actually, he gets his share of both.
Together we hoist my body up off the bench, and I can mostly walk on my own, so he mostly lets me, assisting only when I sway. We trudge like that together out of the gray dive-bay, and he's saying something about the girl, Mei-An, and Don Zachary. A warning maybe. I barely listen. Down the polished steel-floored corridor we go, to the end of the smithy building, and the glass-walled outlook space. Here there's a massage chair with a Cerebro-sonic bath, overlooking the green-gray Allatanc waves, off the edge of our floating barge, skulk 47.
I let him settle me down in the chair, looking out at the gray sky and level sweep of empty ocean. Beyond the glass the Allatanc spreads north into endless nothingness, into spaces where there used to be ice and life. There's nothing left now, not since we blew it all up in our hunt for hydrate resources deep underwater, in the Arctic skirmishes. This is the world we've made for ourselves.
"Switch on your favorite music," Carrolla says, as he guides my head into the bath-spot. He makes a good nurse, better than he'd ever have been as a marine. That's a small mercy. "Settle in and you'll be up in time to party, unless Don Zachary comes for you first."
"Arcloberry," I mumble, in place of what I meant to say which was perhaps some kind of joke.
He nods and repeats the word but I don't hear it, as the world fades back and the sonic bath takes hold with a medley of music I've reacted well to in the past. Underneath the beat it attempts to mimic the sound of a mother's pulse, automatically reverting the body back to the same womb-like state of recovery and growth I put Mei-An into.
It's a poor facsimile for most, and works even less for me, since I never had a mother, and the pulse I grew up to was the seven-tone chime of an external machine womb, but still, I like the music. In a few hours I'll wake up feeling better, and so will Mei-An. We'll probably have sex, part of the contract for those who need a little extra context to frame the mental re-jigging a graysmith provides, and that is not an entirely unpleasant notion. She was pretty, and real.
I drift off thinking of Mei-An and the blunt-nosed face of Don Zachary, while the sonic-bath does its best to smooth the stress of the dive away.
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Copyright © 2015 by Michael John Grist
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Cover art by Francisco Ruiz Nunez.
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Table of Contents
DADDY
THE HATTER
TIDES
OCEAN
CHEF & WAITRESS
LITTLE HATTERS
YELLOW PIE
HOT DOGS
LINT & COBBLES
FAMILY
10 YEARS LATER
T4
RAVI & AMO
INTERLUDE 1
RAGNAROK IV
TEACUP STORM
5 YEARS OLD
HAWAII
INTERLUDE 2
MOUNT
JAPAN
CHINA, MONGOLIA
INTERLUDE 3
JABBERWOCK
IMPOSSIBLE THINGS
CAIRNS
SLEEPER CELL
CERULEAN
Acknowledgements
About the Author
EXTRAS
Mr. Ruins (excerpt)
Zombie Ocean (Book 2): The Lost Page 25
